Microsemi and OneSpin Solutions Target High-reliability Design
Microsemi Corporation, a provider of semiconductor solutions and OneSpin Solutions has announced that OneSpin 360 Equivalence Checking (EC)-FPGA verification solution now fully supports Microsemi's Libero System-on-Chip (SoC) design flow.
Equivalency checking has become a critical component in the verification of high-reliability designs such as safety critical components, ensuring that no issues are introduced during the design refinement process. OneSpin's EC-FPGA product augments Microsemi's Libero design flow to ensure the functional consistency of high-reliability designs throughout design refinement, significantly reducing the risk of an end-product fault.
"OneSpin Solutions has created innovative formal-based design verification and equivalence checking solutions that are being used to fully vet some of the most safety critical designs in production today," said Bruce Weyer, vice president and business unit manager at Microsemi. "We believe that by including equivalence checking as part of the design flow, we will better meet our customers' stringent requirements for high-reliability designs."
Microsemi has seen tremendous adoption of its Libero SoC design software for its SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 FPGAs in 2013, and now has over 44,000 licenses granted year to date. This is being driven by the inherent value the market is seeing with Microsemi FPGAs, which are positioned competitively in mainstream applications for communication, industrial, aerospace and defense markets.
Erik Matusek, the Safety System Platform Manager at Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC said, "The Microsemi ProASIC3 FPGA is a core component of the Advanced Logic System, and use of the OneSpin 360 Equivalence Checker is an integral part of our FPGA development process for nuclear safety systems."
By leveraging OneSpin's equivalence checker with Microsemi's industry-leading design flow, designers can be certain that when they implement the most aggressive design flow optimizations to improve FPGA device power consumption, performance and area utilization, they do not introduce functional errors. The tool verifies functional equivalence between the register transfer level (RTL) code and the netlist prior to FPGA download, thus reducing prototype verification requirements and ensuring that no design flow bugs appear in the final device.
"High reliability is a critical consideration for designers employing Microsemi devices and the reason why equivalence checking is an important technology in this flow," said Dr. Raik Brinkmann, OneSpin Solutions' president and chief executive officer. "Given our own expertise in this area, we are delighted to cooperate with Microsemi on a flow that targets the sharp-end of verification needs, high reliability."
